André Leon Gray, The Choice is Yours, 2010, digital print on vinyl, 5 x 12 ft., Commissioned by the NCMA, funded by the John Rex Endowment through the Physical Activity and Nutrition Branch of the N.C. Division of Public Health
Spring and summer are a great time to visit the Museum Park and discover the latest installation of the Park Pictures project. As you may remember, Park Pictures comprises three “billboards” installed along the paved House Creek Greenway. It is the second project in a continuing series of site-specific art entitled Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the Museum to encourage visitors to explore the art available in the Museum Park. The billboards change on a continual basis to feature new works by different artists.
While the last billboards featured one artist, the new set showcases three, one on each billboard. All of the artists—Stacy-Lynn Waddell, André Leon Gray, and Harrison Haynes—provide the viewer with a unique vision and interpretation. They were given freedom to design their own images without limits to a theme or guidelines, with one exception: artists were asked that their designs somehow relate to the natural environment or the park landscape.
Harrison Haynes, with Untitled (Two Hands), explores the timeless concept of our link to the natural world through a photograph featuring a man-made still life. “I’m interested in the modern human impulse to re-connect with nature,” he says, “And in this piece I want to address the potential for artificiality in fulfilling that impulse.”
In The Choice is Yours, André Leon Gray tackles a similar topic with an environmental slant. Gray’s large-scale image reproduces three mason jars used in canning or preserving food, with each holding a truly valuable treasure. The jars, Gray notes, “become a metaphorical solution to mankind’s neglect of his environment: preserve it or lose it.”
Stacy-Lynn Waddell’s work Look/See is comprised entirely of a mirrored vinyl covering, which reflects the world around it in a blurred, distorted manner. What exactly are we seeing in it? As Waddell explains, “By creating a sight of distorted reflection, I argue that we collectively grapple with determining the difference between perception and reality.”
The Art Has No Boundaries series is part of the Active Community and Neighborhood grant program funded by the John Rex Endowment through the Physical Activity and Nutrition Branch of the N.C. Division of Public Health.
It is always so interesting to be behind the scenes of a project, to see how all the pieces intertwine, and to know the stories that make up the history of how something great came to be.
Fans of the moving arts will have plenty to do and see during the 
On April 22, 1970, I was a sixteen year old kid swept into a movement to “save the world.” We took a train to mid-town where 5th Avenue was closed for what was called a “National Environmental Teach-in.” There and in Central Park we joined hundreds of thousands in a demonstration to stop industrial pollution and the unbridled degradation of our small planet. It was the first Earth Day.
We get some great comments on the blog–often funny, sometimes thought-provoking and nearly always interesting. Case in point: two comments from an 
